[September 2009]Presidential Historian Douglas Brinkley, who has been dubbed “America’s new past master,” recently published his 900-page The Wilderness Warrior:  Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2009).  Brinkley asked John Reiger to proofread the first nine chapters and thanked him on Brian Lamb’s Q&A in several airings of C-SPAN2, the first in April and the most recent in August.  Brinkley noted on C-SPAN that “Professor John Reiger … is the [George Bird] Grinnell scholar at Ohio University-Chillicothe.  He proofread my chapters on Grinnell.” 
          Now that the book has finally appeared, Brinkley refers to “Professor John Reiger of Ohio University-Chillicothe, the leading scholar on George Bird Grinnell,” as one of his “guardian angels,” who “carefully read chapters and offered their expertise” (pp. 898-899). 
          In addition to being cited in the credits of the first two episodes of Ken Burns' new television documentary, The National Parks:  America's Best Idea, John Reiger has had his two books, The Passing of the Great West and American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, listed in the short "Selected Bibliography" of the "companion volume" that only includes "the principal sources used in this book and film series."  
          Also, on September 27th, on PBS, the first two-hour segment will air of Ken Burns’ six-night documentary, “The National Parks:  America’s Best Idea.”  Reiger worked as a paid consultant on the project, providing both rare photographs and documentation that has been incorporated into the narrative.   

[October 2008]New books by OU History Faculty in 2008:

Dantas, Mariana. Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth Century Americas, New York: Palgrave, 2008. Series: The Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World.

Goda, Norman J.W. El oscuro mundo de Spandau: Los criminales nazis, los aliados, y la union sovietica. Madrid: Editorial Critica, 2008. Translation of Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (Cambridge 2007).

Jellison, Katherine. It's Our Day: America's Love Affair with the White Wedding, 1945-2005. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Series: Culture America.

[September 2008] Alonzo Hamby, Emeritus Professor of History, is the author Beyond the New Deal, listed as one of the best books about presidential administrations according to a story in the 5 September 2008 Wall Street Journal.

[May 2007] Benita Blessing, Assistant Professor of History, received a Distinguished Service Award from the Ohio University Office of Nationally Competitive Awards.

[November 2008]David Bresnahan (M.A. program) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship for 2009-10 to support his research in African history.

Seth Givens (M.A. program) won the Society for Military History's Cantigny First Division Foundation and Museum Prize for the Best Paper in Military History by a graduate student at the Northern Great Plains History Conference in October 2009. The title of his paper was "To Us It Was a Funny Part of the War: GIs and Looting in Germany, 1945." The prize carried an award of $400. For a photo of Seth receiving his award, see page 5 of the newsletter of the Society for Military History: http://www.smh-hq.org/docs/GazetteFA09.pdf.

Gerald Goodwin (Ph.D. program) was the graduate student winner of the Beyond Confinement Prize of the African American Studies Department for a research paper on African Americans in Vietnam. Gerald received the award of $500 at the Angela Davis lecture earlier this month.
 
Jeremy Hatfield (Ph.D. program) was selected as the recipient of the Graduate College Fellowship for 2009-10, one of five named fellowships that Ohio University awards each year. The fellowship carries a stipend of $14,487 plus tuition and fee waivers. The title of Jeremy's dissertation is "For God and Country: Conservative Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy at the End of the Cold War."

Sebastian Hurtado Torres (Ph.D. program) is in his second year of graduate study with a grant from the Fulbright Program. He will be writing a dissertation on U.S.-Chilean relations during the 1960s and 1970s.

Bill King (Ph.D. program) is in the third year of a four-year grant from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The grant provides an annual stipend of $20,000 (Canadian). Bill will be writing a dissertation on neoconservatives and Reagan-era foreign policy.

Jon Peterson (Ph.D. program) attended the summer institute of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) held in Madison, Wisconsin, in June 2009. Jon was one of about twenty Ph.D. students from the United States and Europe selected for the Institute. The instructors for the Institute were Fredrik Logevall of Cornell University and Jeremi Suri of the University of Wisconsin (Ohio University History M.A., 1996), and the topic was "Turning Points in the Cold War."  The title of Jon's dissertation is "'An Evil Empire': The Rhetorical Rearmament of Ronald Reagan."

David Prentice (M.A., 2008; Ph.D. program) had his M.A. thesis selected as Ohio University's nominee for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS) Distinguished Master's Thesis Award for 2010. David's thesis, "Getting Out: Melvin Laird and the Origins of Vietnamization," was selected by the Graduate Council from a group of theses nominated by departments across the university as OU's representative for the MAGS award. The winning thesis will be announced in April 2010. The award consists of a plaque and an honorarium of $750. For more information, see: http://www.mags-net.org/ThesisAwards.htm. David will expand his thesis into a Ph.D. dissertation on the origins of Vietnamization.

Joe Venosa (Ph.D. program) conducted Ph.D. research in British colonial archives in the United Kingdom this summer, using a $6,000 Student Enhancement Award. Joe's research is currently one of the lead stories on Ohio University's front door. Joe is working on a dissertation on British colonial rule in Eritrea. Joe also has a FLAS fellowship for 2009-10.

[November 2007] Jack Epstein [PhD student] has received two grants from presidential libraries to further his research. He received a research travel grant from the Gerald Ford Foundation to work on his doctoral dissertation. This highly competitive grant was award to only a few scholars, many of them already established historians. Epstein also received a Moss Grant from the Lyndon Johnson Library/Foundation to also help in his research.

[May 2007] Alex Ferrell [MA 2001] has been accepted into the graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas, where he also received a James Michener Fellowship.

[May 2007] Thomas Bruscino [PhD 2005] is now Assistant Professor in the Command and General Staff College, School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

[October 2008] Katie Flynn ('08) has won the Nels Andrew Cleven Prize in the 2008 Phi Alpha Theta National Paper Competition. The winning paper, "Female Voices from the French Resistance: Women's Exploitation of Gender Stereotypes, 1940-1945," will be published in The Historian sometime in the near future.

[January 2008]Two Ohio University history majors presented papers in the Phi Alpha Theta National Convention, held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, earlier this January. Peter Locascio’s paper, "The Break: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson," examines political relationships during the early Republic through a study of the Adams-Jefferson friendship. Melissa Luthman's paper, "Gender and Gender Roles in Cherokee and Iroquois Society, 1600-1800," explores how Christian missionaries and American legal practices after the Revolution affected gender roles within those Native American communities. “Encouraging and helping students to present their research outside of OU not only allows them the opportunity to fully experience the historian's profession,” says history undergraduate director, Kevin Uhalde, “but also shows the talents and professionalism of our students to a broader audience."

[January 2008] Harrison Crumrine wrote a paper for his 301J class last year on "The Oxford Martyrs and the English Protestant Movement, 1553-1558." That paper has been awarded the Lynn Turner Prize by Phi Alpha Theta (for best undergraduate paper in the country). In addition to the $300 prize money, the  paper has been accepted for publication in The Historian.

[September 2007] Janice Frisch ('07) has received the Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award--one of only fifty students to receive this new award from Phi Kappa Phi.  She received $500, which she will use during her graduate studies at Indiana University.